


Can't find you in the body sleeping next to me

by heavenisalibrary



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-29
Updated: 2015-09-29
Packaged: 2018-04-24 01:27:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4900309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavenisalibrary/pseuds/heavenisalibrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She adjusts to her second life quickly. There’s a day with a fair bit of crying and jagged, muddled memories, where he feels like he’s dealing with Mels all over again, but once her body and soul learn to work together again, she’s River, instantly. It takes him longer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Can't find you in the body sleeping next to me

**Author's Note:**

> Cross-posted from tumblr. May or may not be slightly confusing, as I quite literally wrote it from the final exchange backward.

Having River back is surreal. He’s not clear on how she got out of the Library, or if he was involved, but no matter how many times or ways he asks, she demurs with spoilers and changes the subject with alarming efficiency. He’d thought he remembered everything about her, regardless of how many hundreds of years had come between them, but he’d forgotten how well she knew him. How well she  _handled_  him. He wasn’t sure if it was the control freak in her, or just an unsettling savviness she’d inherited from Amelia, or a residual from her training to kill him, but she could’ve walked him through an agility course like a dog and he wouldn’t’ve realized what was happening until after the fact.

He’s older, grumpier, colder. He wears black and red and never twirls, and his face settles into a frown whenever he’s not paying attention to it, like a river wearing down a canyon until any other expression feels like a little too much work. He’s gone all strict, as River tells him — so he shouldn’t love that she can play him like a fiddle, but he sort of does, a bit.

In many ways, they fall back into old patterns. This new body isn’t as inclined to reach out for others, physically, in the way his previous regeneration had. He finds touching to be somewhat distasteful, a stressful and strange experience that makes him want to snap at whoever makes him do it. With River, though. He’s still hard and Scottish and cantankerous, but with River reaching for his hand and wrapping herself around him and pressing her lips to the nape of his neck when she passes him around the console and leaning against him without a thought, he learns how to be soft again, for her. In other ways, everything is different.

She adjusts to her second life quickly. There’s a day with a fair bit of crying and jagged, muddled memories, where he feels like he’s dealing with Mels all over again, but once her body and soul learn to work together again, she’s River, instantly. 

It takes him longer. Not because he’s forgotten how to be married — it’s disconcertingly easy to do, with her, again — but because he’s already lost her once. Twice, really, counting Trenzalore. River is clever and resourceful and indefatigable, but he can’t imagine she’ll be able to craft a third miracle, and now that he remembers what having her as like, he can’t go back to the way it was.

Taking her gallivanting through time and space becomes enormously difficult, once that thought occurs to him. He takes her on several dates. Dancing, dinner, movies. The sort of things married couples should do, without any of the usual danger that attracts them both. She indulges him for a while, but soon she’s tugging at his strings again, goading him into more dangerous, more thrilling adventures before he even realizes it.

He’s always sort of loved watching River at her best and baddest, but now it makes his hearts constrict. She’s so reckless, and he knows it’s not without cause, because even time itself couldn’t strike her down, many times though it has tried, but it makes his palms sweat. Any time she’s grazed by a bullet or bruised from a fight or trips while they’re running and gets a twinge in her ankle, he feels ill. She’s River and she’s a superhero and she hasn’t had any regenerations left for hundreds of years, and yet here she is, whole and real and strong as ever, maybe even more resilient than he is with his endless regeneration energy, but he  _worries_. It drives her  _mad_.

She pushes back even harder against him. She lulls him into a false sense of security and launches them into war zones and pivotal diplomatic summits and into worlds on the edge of collapse and every day is another madcap adventure with his wife, only he can’t enjoy it. River’s always had a bit of a hardline to her; now, he’s worried that she’s looking for trouble, that her edges are so jagged he might cut himself on them, or worse, she’ll cut herself. She seems to be testing herself, her strength, the vitality of this new life. And he can’t really  _stop_  her because it’s his M.O. too, and because she  _knows_  him inside out and  _knows_  how to persuade him to do things he shouldn’t, doesn’t want to; and he also needs to indulge her, he wants to make her happy, wants to make her light up and it’s a terrible circle, the two of them. He always knew traveling with River alone too long would be bad. He just never knew it would be like  _this_.

Eventually, they end up in the biggest scuffle yet. On a planet that — in a timeline that’s very nearly fixed, with only the  _slightest_  wiggle room, and he hates that River knows it — is an hour from a nuclear detonation that breaks it into pieces and eventually swallows the system its in altogether, River leads him in a dizzy dance to the ship holding the bomb, and there’s only fifteen minutes left. Usually, this sort of pressure thrills him. Now, standing in the hallway, watching River grin as she hacks into the computer system to get the schematics, it makes him want to be sick.

“You can’t do things like this,” he says.

“I do things like this all the time,” she says, “with you, more often than not, and we have done for multiple centuries, if you’ll recall.”

“But that was —”

“Before I died?” she asks, pausing to cast him a glance that’s more than a little irritated. He watches her lips purse as she goes back to the screen. “I’m not made of glass now, honey. This life is just as viable as the last. I’m still  _me_.”

“I know —”

“Do you? Because you’ve been treating me like River 2.0 ever since I came back, like I’m somehow less than I was. I won’t have it. And if I have to keep throwing us into these situations and proving myself to you until you get it through that thick skull, I will, but —”

“You don’t have to prove yourself!” he shouts, abruptly realizing that she hadn’t been testing  _herself_ , but testing  _him_. 

“Obviously I do,” River says. “You used to trust me with these things before. Now you’re all ‘let’s go dancing, River, you don’t need your guns, it’s just a ball.’ And you’re _serious_  about it.” She makes a noise of disgust in her throat, tracing a finger along the screen to locate the appropriate chamber.

The Doctor paces around in a circle behind her, trying to resist the growing urge to pound his head against the wall, or maybe a fist. “I’m trying to  _protect_  you!”

“The whole  _point_  of this — you and me — is that you don’t  _have_  to protect me.”

“That’s not the whole point.”

“No, it’s not the  _whole_  point,” she allows, rolling her eyes and turning to glare at him again. “But it’s no small part of it. You need to trust me again, or this isn’t going to — or I’m going to have to take some time to myself.”

His hearts stutter in his chest at the implication — at this whole  _stupid_  misunderstanding. 

“I trust you!” he says, throwing his hands in the air in frustration. “I trust you more than I trust myself. But I won’t  _lose_  you again, do you understand? You’ve cheated death for yourself, you’ve cheated it for me. Eventually it’s going to come to collect and I will _not_  be a part of it.”

River deflates instantly, turning to face him. “You can’t keep me in a bubble.”

“I know,” he says, “I know.”

“I thought you didn’t think I was… me, still. I thought you were unsure.”

“Don’t be daft,” he practically growled at her. “You’re still you, I’m still me even with this face, and  _that_  is precisely the problem.”

River nods, smiling at him softly. He can only meet her eyes for a moment before he glances away, feeling simultaneously like an idiot, and too vulnerable for this body’s liking. 

“What do you need from me,” River says, “that’ll convince you to let me go diffuse this thing?”

Nothing, he wants to say. Nothing, because he’s lost her what feels like a million times, because he know how reckless she is because she’s just like him, and she doesn’t have the biological ability to press the restart button any time she goes too far. Nothing, because he’s not sure he’ll be able to dig himself back out of that hole when — because it is an  _when_ , not an  _if —_ he loses her again.

“If you love me,” he says, tugging at his coat sleeves before shaking them out, his eyes on his hands rather than her, “tell me you’re going, but say it like you’re going to come back.”

He hears the odd metallic click of her heels against the grated metal flooring of the ship, and then her hand is cupping his chin, tugging his stubborn face up a little roughly — how she did just about everything — to force him to look at her.

“I’m just going to go diffuse a nuclear weapon,” River says. “Just another day at the office.”

He meets her eyes and nods, reaching out to squeeze her arm with his hand. He wants to kiss her or embrace her or just  _say it_ , say outright the words she’s always given so freely but he can’t ever really find, but all he can do is smile thinly and nod. She’s done things like this a million times before — put her life at risk for the good of others, for the good of him, even to win a bet — but it rubs him raw now. He’s only just gotten her back.

“Now off you pop,” she says, “there’s bound to be explosions and other dangers, and I prefer my husband other than chargrilled.”

“Alright,” he says, nodding, stepping back from her, dropping his hand from her arm. “Fine. Don’t go picking fights, or leaving things to the last minute for dramatic effect. It’s self-aggrandizing and, frankly, irritating.”

“You would know,” she quips. He starts to protest, but she doesn’t let him, pulling her hand up to her head to offer him a cheeky salute accompanied by a wink. “See you soon, sweetie.”


End file.
